


Pygmalion Confronts Gallatea at a Street Café in Miami

by scioscribe



Category: Suits (TV)
Genre: Dark, Episode Tag, Future Fic, Gen, Post Season 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-30
Updated: 2012-05-30
Packaged: 2017-11-06 08:30:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/416817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not everyone who deserves a happy ending gets one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pygmalion Confronts Gallatea at a Street Café in Miami

**Author's Note:**

> The darkest outcome to the Season One ending that I could think of, and very much inspired by Harvey and Mike's conversation at the end of "The Shelf Life."

LIZA. I sold flowers. I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me I'm not fit to sell anything else. I wish you'd left me where you found me. 

\--George Bernard Shaw, _Pygmalion_

 

The next time Harvey Specter sees Mike Ross, it’s four years later, in Miami, and he almost doesn’t recognize him.

Mike was always skinny. Donna kept surreptitiously ordering him muffin baskets, Harvey remembers, but there is a new sharpness to him now, as if he’s made of knives. His suit is better and more expensive than any of the ones he had owned when he worked for Pearson Hardman. There’s a cup of coffee in front of him that he isn’t drinking, and when he sees Harvey looking at him, a smile crosses his face, and it’s the kind of smile that even Harvey wants to run away from.

Instead, he sits down in the cast iron chair opposite. It’s hot outside, but Mike isn’t sweating, and Harvey thinks that at last, the kid gets it: he understands how to be cool in any situation.

Then again, maybe Mike just doesn’t care.

“Been a long time, Harvey,” Mike says, and orders Harvey a cup of coffee. His Spanish is perfect.

“Longer than I would have liked,” Harvey says. “I think you know that.” His coffee arrives. When he sips it, it burns the roof of his mouth: the heat eradicates most of the taste, leaving him with just the temperature and nothing else. He sets it down. “I tried to find you—”

“Yeah, the second investigator you hired even came sort of close,” Mike says. “Although ‘sort of’ is the operative phrase there.”

“You read a book about changing your identity in elementary school,” Harvey says, but there’s no sign on Mike’s face that he remembers what Harvey means at all, and that has to be a lie. Mike never forgets anything. “It must have been a good one. Everything completely untraceable, even the money paying your grandmother’s hospital bills, which I’m sure she appreciated, in lieu of actually seeing her grandson from time to time.”

“She wanted me to make something of myself.” His eyes are darker than Harvey remembered. “I don’t think she’d like what I made.”

“You think I would?” There must have been a reason, he thinks, for Mike to have called.

“No,” Mike says, and there’s that smile again, the one that makes him into a stranger. “I just think that I don’t give a damn.”

It’s like the ghost of flavor in his coffee. Everything important has been burned away by now, and what he’s left with is something that hurts. He touches his hand to the cup and the ceramic is still hot enough to almost sear his fingers, but maybe that’s just the sun. It’s so damn hot here, and Mike is the only one who isn’t sweating. “You could have stayed, you know. I would have found you something. Consulting. It wasn’t the end of the world.”

“You mean it wasn’t the end of yours,” Mike says. “How long did it take Jessica to forgive you, exactly? Six months?”

Four. He says, stubbornly, “I wouldn’t have let Trevor—”

“Trevor was the match,” Mike says. “You were the gunpowder. From the second I walked into that hotel room, Harvey,” and for an instant, he is almost Mike Ross again, all wide-eyed intensity, and his suit almost seems to wrinkle, the price dropping before Harvey’s eyes, but then it’s gone, and he’s leaning back in his chair, cool as the breeze that seems like it’s never going to come. “You could have had me consult. You could have paid my way through law school—isn’t that what Jessica did for you? Instead, you gave me everything I ever wanted, in a way that meant I’d never be able to keep it, so you were right, after all. You never did care about me.”

“I care,” Harvey says, because there’s no point in lying about it now, because the very fact that he’s sitting here, having this conversation—that when Mike called, he came—is a confession already. “Come back to New York with me.”

Mike shakes his head. “I have something here now.” He doesn’t say _I have a life here now_ , and all at once Harvey understands why Mike isn’t sweating, because he’s gone cold, too.

He says, “Why did you even call me?”

“Old time’s sake,” Mike says. He puts a hundred dollar bill down on the table. “You know, while you’re here, you should really try swimming. The beaches are excellent.” And that’s it, that’s all Harvey’s getting, because Mike stands up and puts on his sunglasses.

“What do you do?” Harvey asks, even though he doesn’t want to know. Even though he knows already. History repeats itself, and the only difference is that each time around, it’s a little worse.

Mike says, “What do you think?” He picks up his briefcase. This time, the clasp holds.


End file.
